8 Tips for Creating The Perfect Buyer Persona
If you dream of having a less frustrating experience in the sales and marketing of your business, it is vital to get your brand’s buyer persona right. The more you know a person the easier it becomes for you to know how best to position your marketing campaign to get the desired action you want that person to take. This is what creating a perfect buyer persona helps you achieve, and this is what big and successful companies consistently aim for when trying to increase their sales.
It is not wise to start investing in marketing campaigns either online or offline without first understanding who your customers are. Knowing who will buy your products will help you know the right channels to use to market the product or service today them.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is largely a fictional detail about your target audience. It’s more like you zooming in on your target audience to get specific details about who they really are by uncovering how any demographic and psychographic information about them. Want to create yours too? The help of a digital marketing agency will come in handy, but you can also consider the following eight tips to create the perfect buyer persona.
1. Make it very personal
Think of your buyer persona as a real human being, because in actual fact, your buyers are. So rather than thinking of them as robots somewhere ready to spend their money, give them a face and be detailed about the personality you are creating. Do they have children? Are they married or single? Are they employed or not? How long have they been employed in that company? What position is the person holding in the company? How old are they? Where do they live? How much do they earn? After answering these questions follow up by, give the person a name to make it more real.
2. Give room for changes
That you create a buyer persona this year doesn’t mean that you should use the same exact buyer persona next year. The reason for this is that change is constant; your customers are always looking for something new. Even if the changes are small, you need to give room for people to evolve and change. This implies that if your buyer persona was 18 years old, as at the time you created it, then 2 to 4 years down the line the buyer persona has to be updated to what a 20 to 24-year-old person’s demographic and psychographic information would be.
3. Create multiple buyer personas
In creating a perfect buyer persona, you need to have multiple buyer personas that cover every target audience niche in your target market. Your target market could comprise of those buying for themselves or those buying to resell, depending on the kind of products you are selling. It could also comprise of women or men of a certain age group. Your target market is usually a broader range of your target audience while your target audience is a specific niche in that target market. So the wider your target market is, the wider your buyer persona must be. Creating multiple personas allows you to fully have a grip over who your products would be of great help to and how best to present this product to them in order to get sales.
4. Ask your existing customers for help
If you already have existing customers who are loyal to your brand, start building a buyer persona around them. Take some time off to call them and ask a few questions that would better help you understand who they are. Or you could ask them to help you fill out a survey or for their feedback on certain other aspects of the business, you want to improve.
5. Make use of analytics tool
Often we overlook the vast data at our disposal in analytics; whether Facebook, Instagram, Google Analytics or any other tool that is used to analyse data for your website, social media and customer relationship management software. If you can’t understand the jargons in some of these tools, you can hire a digital marketing agency to help out extract data and convert them to meaningful information you can use to understand the behavior of users which you can use to build a rough sketch of your buyer persona.
6. Use the buyer persona template of your competitors
If you can’t afford to hire an expert to dig this out from your competitors, you might have to go the hard way by carrying out a comprehensive competitive analysis of strong competitors in your niche. This gives you deeper insight into the people that are consistently targeting and the channels that they use. All the information you can gather will give you a peek into the “template” they use, which you can adopt and personalize it to suit the focus of the brand and its uniqueness in relation to the service or product you are offering.
7. Make use of social media
If someone that is following you on social media is consistently buying from you, the wise thing to do is to check that person out. Even if the person doesn’t follow you, you can still check out their page to understand that buyer. Social media also allows you to see activities of people you follow, that’s why it’s a good idea to follow your customers on their social handles to monitor the kind of things that interest them (usually the posts they like or comment). This can really help you with creating a buyer persona that you can work with for your marketing campaigns.
8. Get feedback from your sales team
If you have a sales team, they are a very good source of getting accurate information about the real-time behavior of customers they have interacted with. They can give you a generalised idea about these people that they have interacted with which you can build on to create a buyer persona. You can also have your sales team do more interactions with customers online or offline to get to know them better. Then they can always provide feedback that you can work with.